Quincy Welding Speed Secrets Revealed

[Original Looper 1]

How many of you know that the very first Quincy stacks were made from my mom's brand new vacuum cleaner attachments?

Mom still tells me the story of how in the 1950's she finally saved up enough money to buy a brand new Kirby vacuum cleaner with all sorts of attachments, and dad came home at lunch with pipes on his mind. He saw mom's brand new chrome vacuum extension "pipes" and persuaded her to hand over the attachments so he could try them on his motor as tune pipes.

Well, she never got them back. Somebody out there may have the original Quincy Racing - Kirby pipes. I came across this picture of a Hurricane motor owned by Bob Dunlap, and this could very possibly be those 1st original Quincy pipes. That motor has got to be worth a fortune now if it is indeed the original one.

Now tell the truth, how many of you out there stole your mom's vacuum attachments to experiment with on your motors?

thanks,
Paul A. Christner


Please note: the pictures are for your enjoyment but are not to be copied to other web sites without written permission.

[Original Looper 1]

Sometimes some of the best racing innovations come about by accident. 2 major Quincy Welding racing advances started out as flukes.

The 1st was water injection. We had an extremely porous aluminum cylinder casting on a Looper that significantly leaked water in the exhaust port area. It had phenomenal torque down low but couldn't seem to rev up. After discovering the leak by pressure testing the block, we knew we were on to something and started the process of developing water injection on the Loopers in the mid 1960s. Jerry Waldman won many championships using Quincy Welding's water injection systems.

The 2nd fluke was loose sleeve liners. We had 3 A engines that were dimensionally exactly alike. However, 1 consistently pulled significantly more horsepower on the dyno. That drove my father crazy for 2 or 3 years. We finally found out one day, when dad pressed the sleeves out, that the sleeves were barely making contact around the exhaust area or a major part of the cylinder. We then intentionally designed an experimental A with loose sleeves & it pulled more power. Quincy Welding then tried tighter sleeves on that engine and it then slowed down. This was quite a discovery. We're talking 3 to 5% difference in horsepower.

I might add, yes you can have sleeves that are too loose. Ideally, for our use, we ended up using a sleeve with 1/2 thousands interference and a large shoulder to secure it's stability. This area, I feel, has much yet to be discovered.

More coming, stay tuned.

Paul A. Christner
Quincy Welding & Quincy Racing

[Master Oil Racing Team]

The water injection intrigued Dieter very much Paul. Walt Blankenstein had watched Jerry and them some others doing well with the water injection. In 1976 Walt took a water injection system to Berlin and installed it on an A Konig with the injection tip at the convergence of the manifold.

Dieter fired up the Konig on the dyno and got maximum torque and Walt hit the button. You should have seen Dieter's eyes when he shut the engine off. When the water was first injected the revs came up faster than Dieter could control the water brake on his dyno. I don't remember everything we tried that day, but we figured out if you kept injecting water too long after the intial burst, the engine power rapidly fell off. I don't know if it reacted the same way with the loopers and megaphone exhausts, but Dieter was definitely turning some wheels in his head.

I imagine he did further testing, but I never heard anything more. If you could find that book of his and read German, I am sure there were some very interesting remarks.

[Skoontz]

Water used to pull more torque on megaphone exhausts similarly to what you are explaining here. Why? With a mixed fuel crossflow motor at lower speeds dad always said if it was held into the chambers longer it would fire harder, i.e. bigger explosions. If you hold the water button down too long, you're creating more back pressure and the engine has too much burned/dirty air in for the next charge.

The loose cylinder liner is pretty fascinating. Perhaps the way they expand as the motor heats up???? I dunno....

[Mark75H]

If you are injecting enough water to create higher back pressure you are probably injecting too much.

Water changes the temperature of the exhaust gases in the chamber or megaphone ... slowing down the sound wave ... same effect as sliding the pipe longer

[Mike Schmidt]

When I ran the Yamato piston port 250 motors, I changed out a lot of sleeves. Not fun. Freeze sleeve, heat block in wife's oven, stink up house..., get burnt trying to get ports lined up. Ports dont line up just right, start over.

Used the same .003-.004 interferance fit on my Kawasaki based 250 motors. I built my own sleeves from blanks. It was a huge pain to match the ports to the ducts in the cylinder castings. Used to spend days (not hours) with the die grinders.

After some suggestions from Harry and Mitch Meyer, I started slip fitting the sleeves and having Harry molly coat the O.D. of the sleeve to get the correct interferance fit. It was much easier to do the porting when you could slip the sleeve in and out to grind on it or the cylinder casting. Was much better, but still a pain to get everything lined up when hot....

One spring I was in a time crunch, like most boat racers and decided to try something new. I glued the sleeves in with Loctite Quick Metal. I had been useing it for several years on bearings. Thought it would work, so gave it a try. That set of cylinders ran VERY well. Won Depue Nationals with them in '96.

My thinking is that they do not have a bunch of stress pushing on them, so they stay straighter. ???? Kind of neat, both finding this speed secret on "A" motors, 30 somthing years apart.

Michael D- 1

[Neil_M50D2]

[QUOTE=Mike Schmidt;27047]

One spring I was in a time crunch, like most boat racers and decided to try something new. I glued the sleeves in with Loctite Quick Metal. I had been useing it for several years on bearings. Thought it would work, so gave it a try. That set of cylinders ran VERY well. Won Depue Nationals with them in '96.

My guess is that the glue provided some insulation thereby causing the engine to run hotter. Hotter = more HP until it reaches oops temperature. Have accomplished the same thing by squeezing down the water discharge.
Neil Bass

[Mark75H]

This thread was going pretty off topic from Paul's original theme, but was pretty interesting so I moved the other posts to this new thread:

Water injection questions from ... (http://www.boatracingfacts.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3748)

[franka]

[QUOTE=Mike Schmidt;27047]

One spring I was in a time crunch, like most boat racers and decided to try something new. I glued the sleeves in with Loctite Quick Metal. I had been useing it for several years on bearings. Thought it would work, so gave it a try. That set of cylinders ran VERY well. Won Depue Nationals with them in '96.

My guess is that the glue provided some insulation thereby causing the engine to run hotter. Hotter = more HP until it reaches oops temperature. Have accomplished the same thing by squeezing down the water discharge.
Neil Bass


I would guess the sleeves had room to expand and the piston and ring fit became looser than the original set-up that was done at room temperature. As a consequence of the looser fit the rpms went up and more horses were set free.

That's just a educated guess.

[RichardKCMo]

Frank, where you from.
RichardKCMo

[franka]

Frank, where you from.
RichardKCMo

Originally Detroit. My dad and I ran D stock and a D looper in Michigan in the 60s. I'm now in Dallas, TX.

There was a guy that lived in St Clair Shores, MI (i think that's it) that owned a machine shop and cast and machined Quincy knock offs. I can't recall his name and probably wouldn't even recognize it if I heard it. Maybe some of you know who I'm talking about.

[Original Looper 1]

Rotary Valve, Piston Port & Reed Valve Theory

When my father and I re-instituted the Quincy R&D program in 1975 to create the "Z" engine, we experimented significantly with rotary valve, piston port and reed valve intake designs. Believe it or not, the piston port design had a slight advantage but not at the top RPM as you would expect.

There's an experimental Quincy M out there somewhere that has to be worth a fortune as it had rotary valve, piston port and external reed valves ALL functioning for the purpose of establishing what we felt was, at that time, the ultimate intake system or combination. I remember running it on the dyno with my father, Chris, and juggling between the combination of partial reeds and rotary or partial reeds and piston port or all 3 at once. Each system had it's own carburetor and I remember the best combination was wide open carb with multiple external reeds in conjunction with 1/3 open carb with piston port.

( Note: We machined a considerable amount of deflector race engines with the internal 3rd port - piston port set up. We left most of that development set on the workbench at that time in 1975 while we were desperately trying to re-institute the pro outboard Quincy development program. )

I believe, personally, that the internal piston port in conjunction with the Mercury internal reed valve hasn't even begun to be fully developed or progressed for the Mod Mercury engines.

Since we went out of the racing business in the early 80's, I have come up with so many new ideas to try - you can't imagine. The old saying "you can't see the forest for the trees" is very applicable to racing development -- when you're away from it, the ideas start flowing. When you're actually intensely doing development, progressive ideas become as scarce as winning lottery numbers.

Case in point: when we invented the converging pipe exhaust in the early 1960s, it had almost the same top end but considerably better acceleration. Therefore it was faster around the race course and other engine makers followed our lead. Looking back, the propellers were obviously antiquated in design by today's standard. There's no doubt, with today's propeller technology advancements, individual pipes on mods and deflectors would produce more horsepower and run faster around the race course.

The things that my father taught me never to forget in engine development are the 3 p's: pistons, ports, pipes. The integration of the 3, and the various combinations, has almost infinite possibilities for performance gains.

My advise? Keep thinking outside of the box.

Paul A Christner

[Master Oil Racing Team]

Hey Paul--here are those pics I PM'd you about. They were Alex 1977.

[Allen J. Lang]

Originally Detroit. My dad and I ran D stock and a D looper in Michigan in the 60s. I'm now in Dallas, TX.

There was a guy that lived in St Clair Shores, MI (i think that's it) that owned a machine shop and cast and machined Quincy knock offs. I can't recall his name and probably wouldn't even recognize it if I heard it. Maybe some of you know who I'm talking about.

Franka- Are you thinking of the lte Bud Parker of Birmingham, MI? Bud built a small amount of Loopers in A,B and D. They were set up for acceleration rather than hi end. The only known ones I have seen are owned by Tim Kurcz of Milford, MI who bought Bud's machine equipment. I last saw Bud at the July2006 AOMC meet at Constantine meet and he passed away a few months later. He was a great guy helping the mod guys set up. He was always a joy to talk to.

Ye Olde Desert Geezer Al Lang

[smittythewelder]

Mike Schmidt, some years ago there was (and might still be) a small aerospace subcontractor in Southern Cal that did a little sideline work for owners of old Brit-bikes. These products of pre-Thatcher English labour had so much porosity in the crankcase castings that they leaked oil right through the crankcase walls! The SoCal outfit took new or vapor-degreased castings and immersed them in a vat of Loctite and drew a vacuum on them, to fill the porosity. More to the point here, they did a similar thing to fill any gap between cylinder sleeves and blocks. BUT, they thought this might IMPROVE heat transfer . . .

[Don Muncie]

In reading Paul's post, he made a comment:

I believe, personally, that the internal piston port in conjunction with the Mercury internal reed valve hasn't even begun to be fully developed or progressed for the Mod Mercury engines."

This is so true! While job shopping, I had the chance to talk with a bunch of guy's that are into performance and as I was talking to them, I keep my mind open cause some times comments get made that really hits home when you stop and think about it. Man, did it ever!! I don't have much in the way of a large collection of Quincy stuff, but what I do have does cover a very long period of history. I was looking at the stacks and a question came up to me:

Our props have come such a long way, so have the progression of hydro technology, the question is; Is it time to look at older technology, and would the ideas thought of back then be made faster yet again? I firmly believe the answer is YES!!

If the new job will allow it and the owners of "Lake X West" will allow it, I'm gonna spend an aweful lotta time down there testing! Stay tuned for further developements..film at 11!

Thanks All.

Don